something of a rarity.  In most instances he was a man of wealth and high social standing, who looked upon his semester or two as a romantic episode.  But now every outward-bound steamer carries with it one or more who, emerging from obscurity and poverty, have saved up a few hundred dollars and are bent upon plain, hard, practical business.  “We go,” they can be imagined as saying, “because we can get in Germany what we cannot get at home.  Your schools of science and your post-graduate courses may be well enough in their way, but they do not give us what we are after, and we cannot afford to wait until they may be able to give it.  Some of the professors are first-rate men—­perhaps just as good as any we may meet in Germany—­but what does their learning, their science, avail us, so long as they are obliged to withhold from us the best that they know?  They trained themselves in Germany, and if we are ever to rival them we must do the same.”

It is not pleasant to listen to such reasonings, much less to see them carried into effect.  But the defect which they bring to light will not be cured by closing our eyes to it and trusting to time, the sovereign healer.  Time is a negative factor:  it only enables the forces of Nature to do their positive work.  But schools and colleges are not the product of the elemental forces of Nature:  they are distinctively the work of man as a free agent.  If we are free to shape any of our institutions to suit our needs, we are certainly free to shape our educational institutions.  By having a definite result in view, and willing its attainment, we may succeed; but if we fail either in clearness of vision or persistency of will, we cannot expect the result to come of itself.  The present university system of Germany, which might seem to a careless observer the natural outgrowth of German life, is the result of hard thinking and strenuous, well-directed effort.  We should not commit much of an exaggeration were we to call it the deliberate creation of Frederick the Great, Von Zedlitz and Wolf, who dragged with them Prussia, and the other German states in her wake.  They and their associates and followers, Schleiermacher and William von Humboldt, clear-headed, iron-willed men, perceived what was needed, and bent all their energies to the task.  They emancipated the schools from the control of the clergy, and established the principle that teaching is a distinct vocation, requiring special training, over which the state has supervision; furthermore, that the state should pronounce who is fit and who is not fit for university education, thereby abolishing entrance-examinations, and putting an end to the ignoble practice on the part of the universities of lowering the standard for the purpose of increasing the number of students.  They abolished the last vestiges of the scholastic system by raising the faculty of philosophy from its position as a quasi-preparatory course to the others, and placing it on a footing